Private Lives: hit me, baby, one more time

Richard Eyre on what drew him to direct the violent but hilarious Private
Lives starring Kim Cattrall.

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Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen in Private Lives: 'It's one of the few plays that deals honestly with sexual attraction'

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Romance with the gloves off: Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen

By Robert Gore-Langton

5:19PM GMT 26 Feb 2010

Noël Coward wrote Private Lives when he was 30, in bed in a trademark Chinese dressing gown; it took him just four days. It’s the tragedy of two people who can’t live either together or apart, turned into a three-act bare-knuckle comedy served up with cocktails. With its glamour, romance and repartee, the play is today probably Coward’s greatest claim to theatrical permanence. Eighty years on it remains popular with audiences, a hardy perennial which has doubtless saved the bacon of many clapped-out theatre producers.

Now the West End is to get a new blue-chip production featuring the Canadian actress Kim Cattrall (famous for playing Samantha in Sex and the City) opposite the pin-up British actor Matthew Macfadyen (both pictured above), who plays the Sheriff of Nottingham in the new film of Robin Hood out in May.

The pair play the ditzy Amanda and the suave Elyot, the rich, elegant, divorced couple who by chance meet up on adjoining balconies at their Deauville hotel while on their honeymoons. They fall in love again, abandon their new spouses and elope to Paris where, their lust cooling, the bickering starts up again. It is the sort of violent, slap-happy comedy the police would categorise as “a domestic”.

Sir Richard Eyre, the director, has never staged a Coward play before, as he explained over a Guinness in Bath where the play has just run at the Theatre Royal. He had wanted to do Ibsen’s Ghosts with Cattrall but that didn’t happen and Private Lives is now the funnier, if frothier, choice. Eyre thinks Cattrall is “a lovely, droll, witty stage presence”. He is also a fan of Coward’s early plays and argues that The Vortex (his first hit – “cocaine and queers”, in period parlance) was a bigger watershed in British theatre than Look Back in Anger a generation later. Private Lives, too, was a breakthrough.

“It’s one of the very few plays that deals honestly and directly with sexual attraction. It’s not euphemistic and it deals with a couple who are deeply attracted to each other sexually and almost unable to tolerate each other when sex isn’t involved. It’s unambiguous without spelling anything out or using a four-letter word. It is also very unsentimental, which in a romantic comedy – and I think Private Lives is the first modern stage rom-com – is very unusual. Coward doesn’t go all soppy on you.”

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In this version Amanda’s pompous new husband Victor is played by the brilliant silly-ass specialist Simon Paisley Day in a role originated by the young Laurence Olivier. Eyre points out that many of the play’s famous lines (“very flat, Norfolk”) aren’t funny in themselves, only in their context. Nor is the violence gratuitous. Amanda’s fond memory of Elyot first hitting her – during a nostalgic discussion of their juiciest rows – is part of the play’s scintillating honesty.

Eyre doesn’t buy the idea that the homosexual Coward had written it as a covert “gay play”: “It’s written by a workaholic man who had no close relationships and stood back and watched all his friends – hetero and homosexual – make fools of themselves by falling in love and having affairs. It’s very much sketched from life.”

His point is borne out by an anecdote about a man who complained to the playwright that nobody rowed, squabbled and rolled about the floor like they do in the play. Coward’s terse response was to refer to a society couple: “You obviously don’t know the Castlerosses.”

The play treats divorce with an heroic flippancy. Might it do some good in defusing the whole painful business? “I am old enough to remember divorce being a big thing,” says the undivorced Eyre. “My parents, who had ample reasons for divorcing didn’t for reasons of social propriety. That’s largely gone now. But I do think it’s far better on marriage than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” As with love, the casting of the lead roles is all a question of chemistry. “Or as Amanda would put it,” says Eyre, “chemical what d’you-call-’ems”.

'Private Lives’ is at the Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2 (0844 4124663) from Wednesday March 3